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Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps

Posted by Soulskill on from the heard-new-york-liked-microsoft-too dept.

netbuzz writes "The city of Boston, which employs 20,000 people, has become the latest large organization to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The city estimates that the move will save it $280,000 a year. Microsoft's reaction? 'We believe the citizens of Boston deserve cloud productivity tools that protect their security and privacy. Google's investments in these areas are inadequate, and they lack the proper protections most organizations require.' More and more customers aren't buying that FUD." Hopefully they'll be more satisfied than Los Angeles was (PDF).

4 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Of note... by somarilnos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The link that suggests that Los Angeles was unhappy with their switch to Google does not, in fact, say that. The link is to a letter of a consumer group bitching to LA about their switch to Google. Given, by all accounts, things did not go smoothly, but maybe a better link would be this?

    1. Re:Of note... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      An equally interesting link would be: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/

      Where they show that Consumer Watchdog is actually a PR/lobbying firm hired by MS.

  2. Re:Why is the FUD FUD? by Dishevel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I switched my company over to Google Apps.
    30 Users. With Drive for sharing, Groups and aliases. It works really well for us with extremely simple administration and really good uptime.
    Simple, Flexible and inexpensive.

    --
    Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
  3. Re:Only $280k? by batkiwi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When people say AD they don't mean the LDAP part with centralised user accounts. That's been doable for ages.

    When windows admins talk about AD, they are talking about all of the things that you can do with group policy and how those policies apply to different containers in a hierchical or cross cutting way, depending on configuration.

    With AD and GPO you can:
    -choose who has access to which desktops or servers and at what level in a granular or structured way (web admins have admin on web boxes but not mail servers, etc)
    -choose what machines have what software installed and in what way
    -set things like storage quotas (mailbox or otherwise) depending on a user's position/job
    -delegate a login server and storage cache depending on a user's physical location
    -enable and disable OS features (developers get IIS and debugging, people in finance don't)
    -configure access to shared mailboxes/other resources

    So if Jim moves from finance to web development, you drag and drop is user into another OU and add him to 5-10 groups on the AD server. Next time he logs on his access levels, what software is installed, what mail he has access to, his quotas, etc all change instantly.

    This CAN be hacked together with a bunch of scripts, a custom repository, NIS/openLDAP, and some other stuff in Linux, but it's not well documented, well supported, or something you can ask ANY linux admin to do and they will do it in the same way.